This topic describes what things to consider when you measure your network speed with Ookla Speedtest.
If you are using Ookla Speedtest to measure your network speed, take the following points into consideration:
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- Turn off the location services on your device. Ookla Speedtest may use the location services to determine the closest server to you.
If you have the location services enabled, it may result in, for example the following situation: Let’s assume that you’re currently located in Karlsruhe, Germany, and you’ve connected to the West Coast, USA, location with FREEDOME VPN. When you run Ookla Speedtest, it gets your real location in Karlsruhe, Germany, from your device’s location services, and opts to that server. All the speed test traffic makes then the following kind of a round trip:
- VPN tunnel from Karlsruhe, Germany, to the West Coast, USA
- Public internet from West Coast, USA, to the Ookla Speedtest servers in Karlsruhe, Germany
- Public internet from Karlsruhe, Germany, to the West Coast, USA
- VPN tunnel from West Coast, USA, to Karlsruhe, Germany
It is roughly 9 000 kilometers straight from Karlsruhe to our servers in the West Coast, USA, but it is safe to assume it’s at least 13 000 kilometers through the cables – and almost certainly considerably more. In other words, it is a distance of over 50 000 km that your speed test traffic is making, through a large number of various network devices.
According to the laws of physics, with the speed of light, 50 000 km translates into 166 milliseconds but even with fibre optic cables, it is only possible to get to approximately two thirds of the speed of light. This double round trip would therefore take at least 250 milliseconds, plus all the time spent in the various networking devices.
Based on the above, it makes a huge difference if the Ookla Speedtest server is close to the FREEDOME location you’ve selected to use, or if it is close to your physical location.
- Ookla Speedtest often remembers what server it has used previously and will use the same server if you’re doing multiple tests in a row. Usually, you need to force the Ookla Speedtest app to stop to make the app select a new server to test with.
- Ignore the packet loss percentage displayed by the Ookla Speedtest client. The UDP-based protocol used by Ookla Speedtest is constructed so that it will trigger a certain protection feature in F-Secure FREEDOME VPN which in return will show up as around 70% packet loss in the Ookla Speedtest client. If there really was a 70% packet loss, the network connectivity wouldn’t exist at all.
Note: The UDP-based protocol used by Ookla Speedtest doesn’t simulate real life network traffic, and thus it doesn’t give an accurate view of the connection speed. The speed-critical services, such as video streaming or file transfer protocols, are typically totally different from the Ookla Speedtest’s UDP protocol.